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Paper short abstract:

Peer support in mental health is a vital case study in participatory collaborative research. As peer movements offer reparative alternatives to institutional psychiatric knowledge, the inclusion of peer researchers is imperative. Diffractive workshopping is a means for navigating such complexities.

Paper long abstract:

Participatory collaborative research argues that individuals who have historically been the subjects of research should be actively included as producers of research themselves. Peer support in mental health is a vital case study in this context. Peer professionals are individuals with lived experiences as mental health service users who have been trained to support others experiencing psychiatric crises. Peer support offers a reparative alternative to institutional psychiatric knowledge regimes, making the inclusion of peer researchers a methodological imperative. While the inclusion of peer researchers generates diverse multi-professional teams, it also surfaces conflicts regarding how knowledge is produced, the hierarchies embedded in research institutions and protocols, and how the expectations placed on peer researchers risk universalising “lived experience” as a token category. To this roundtable, I offer my firsthand experience as an anthropologist in these spaces of methodological and political transformation over the last twelve years, highlight the challenges I have encountered in developing proposals for participatory collaborative research, and outline a methodological framework for collaborative knowledge production grounded in the work of feminist scholars of science and society. This framework draws on the scholarship of Karen Barad and Isabelle Stengers to develop “diffractive workshopping” as a “slow science” that allows multi-professional research teams to not just approach encounters in the field from a collaborative perspective, but to think divergent positionalities through each other in deliberate and explicit ways that take seriously the dynamics and histories of research team members as factors in the production of knowledge.